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Semantic Arts gist upper enterprise ontology
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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Language should be a subclass of Artifact #1126

Closed rjyounes closed 4 months ago

uscholdm commented 4 months ago

Maybe whales have a language? Broaden Artifact definition to be 'mammal-made'?

rjyounes commented 4 months ago

Not sure if this is tongue in cheek, but I guess you're right, animals can have languages, and not just mammals. No, I don't think we want to broaden artifact to mean mammal made or animal made. However, perhaps it should include computer-made objects. I don't think in our current world we can infer from the fact that a computer is human-made, and X is computer-made, that X is human-made.

Closing this issue due to the valid objection about animal languages.

stevenchalem commented 4 months ago

Until there are language tags for non-human languages, I think it's safe to treat "Language" as synonymous with "human language." Gist is already English-centric; keeping it anthropocentric should be acceptable.

stevenchalem commented 4 months ago

But we wouldn't want to expand "Artifact" to include creations of non-human agents, since that goes against the common usage of the word. Instead, Artifact could be a sub-class of BiogenicThing, which would encompass the products of animals, plants, bacteria, etc. TechogenicThing could cover the products of computers, robots, etc. Finally we could have a superclass for BiogenicThing and Technogenic thing. But let's wait until we have some client use cases.

rjyounes commented 4 months ago

Until there are language tags for non-human languages, I think it's safe to treat "Language" as synonymous with "human language." Gist is already English-centric; keeping it anthropocentric should be acceptable.

The current gist definition of Language already includes computer languages.

stevenchalem commented 4 months ago

The current gist definition of Language already includes computer languages.

For now, at least, those are still artifacts.